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Amazon Quietly Lowered Its Free Shipping Minimum to $35 (fortune.com)
Retailers have been busy over the weekend with Presidents Day promotions and sales, but Amazon had a significant surprise discount of its own. From a report: In a blink-and-miss-it move, the online retail giant quietly reduced its free shipping minimum rate to $35. The change was picked up and reported by a number of news outlets over the weekend, and was spotted by Fortune as well during the online checkout process. Amazon confirmed the change on its shipping guidelines and options page, designating which items and regions for delivery are eligible for free shipping. Amazon's free shipping rate, arguably one of the promotions on the site that has been the most popular and vaulted it to its e-commerce throne in years past, has gone up and down over the years. The free shipping minimum has been as low as $25 in the past and was most recently as high as $49.
When free shipping went up to $49, I stopped buying as much from them. I might use them more again now, $35 was easy to pad a purchase to reach- $49 isn't.
Good call Amazon!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Walmart's started advertising free two-day shipping with no membership required.
Not that you should be buying cheap crap from China from Walmart. For that, go to Harbor Freight.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you stick to Prime eligible products, you don't have to deal with the fraud as you're dealing with Amazon and not a third party.
Depends how you define "dealing with" Amazon is not always the seller, they are increasingly a logistics/fulfillment company and not the seller. While it being Prime does mean they have the product in one of their warehouses it absolutely does not mean you are buying it from Amazon. In many cases they are just warehousing products for someone else and they send you the product which has been barcoded by the actual seller when you purchase it. If you have a problem with the product you might soon learn that it isn't Amazon you bought it from, prime or not.
Sorry to break the news to you. US tax payers, like you and me, are subsidizing the packages shipped via the postal service from China :(
http://fortune.com/2015/07/03/...
One of the core reasons why US manufacturer's can't complete is that our tax policy favors gains from the speculative market, ie real estate and stock market, over the actual manufacturing of products. Another core reason is that the American consumers simply wants cheap products made in an authoritarian country that is actively competing with us militarily and economically, with the goal of becoming the dominate power in the world.
At the end, we only have ourselves to blame. We voted for the politicians who set fiscal policies that decimated our manufacturing base, and we simply like to buy cheap crap from China.
Keep this up, and China will bankrupt us in the coming arms/space race, much like how we did it to the USSR.